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SS Tuscania (1921)

passenger ship

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 30, 2026
Entity authorityQ96404734 ↗
Source-derived summary

SS Tuscania was built by Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company, and launched on 4 October 1921 for the Anchor Line.

Building and description

During the First World War, several large liners of Glasgow-based Anchor Line (Henderson Bros) Ltd were lost, including the earlier Tuscania of 1914. Embarking on a replacement programme even before the end of 1918, the replacement Tuscania for the Mediterranean-New York service was built by Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Govan, Glasgow, as yard number 595. She measured 16,991 gross register tons (GRT) and 10,016 net register tons (NRT), was 552.3 ft (168.3 m) long between perpendiculars by 70.3 ft (21.4 m) beam and had a depth of 38.6 ft (11.8 m). She had six Brown-Curtis steam turbines, also made by Fairfield, driving twin screws via double reduction gearing, giving her a speed of 15.5 knots (28.7 km/h; 17.8 mph).

The ship was formally named Tuscania when launched on 4 October 1921, in the midst of the post-war economic slump, when many shipowners, Anchor Line included, had asked builders to slow or suspend building work. Tuscania was not completed until almost a year later; she ran sea trials on 8 September 1922 and was registered at Glasgow with Official Number 146307. As completed, she has capacity for 2,462 passengers (267 1st class, 377 2nd and 1818 3rd) and a complement of 342 officers and crew.

History

Anchor Line

Earlier plans to deploy Tuscania on the company's Mediterranean-New York service were changed, and she began her career on the Glasgow-Moville-New York route, leaving the Clyde on her maiden voyage on 16 September 1922. She continued on the North Atlantic, with occasional New York-Mediterranean voyages, until May 1926.

Editorial summary

“SS Tuscania (1921)” enters the record as passenger ship. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Tuscania, passenger and ship can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1921, 1914, 1918, 1922—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Tuscania, passenger and ship.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“SS Tuscania (1921)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Tuscania, passenger and ship provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q96404734. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1921, 1914, 1918 and 1922.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “SS Tuscania (1921)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.